by James Enge
“You're right,” she whispered. “I'll be still.”
Somehow that helped. He waited, adrift in a fog of pleasure-that-was and the agony of pleasure self-denied.
The room waited, silent, as sunlight died. The room grew dim, then dark. No lamps were lit.
Blue light appeared in the windows: the eyes of the moons were opening with the departure of the sun's light. The light grew stronger, bluer, more bitter, more intoxicating. Rokhlenu looked through the window straight into the face of Trumpeter and knew that this was the moment.
He yielded to the moment of transformation, and Wuinlendhono did the same. His shadow rose up and towered over him; hers did the same. The two shadows passed through each other, mingling as their bodies mingled, transforming them as they coupled; day shape with night shape and female with male they were bonded in an endless instant of transformation and sexual union.
Their screams gave way to ecstatic howls; they lay, still joined, in the night shape.
Slowly, hungrily, intently, patiently, Rokhlenu began to grind into his mate as she rocked back against him. They were mated now.
Rokhlenu found that his grief was not gone. If anything, he was even more aware of his loss, of his beloved dead. And he grieved for Wuinlendhono and their love. They were mortal; they would die; their love would be forgotten as if it never had been.
But this was their hour, and all the ages of nothingness to come could not wash away this one glorious moment of being and becoming. If this was life, and he felt it was, it was worth even the price of death to feel this way.
Morlock was drinking slowly and he was not yet drunk. But he had begun to drink on purpose, not merely to be polite, and that meant that most of the man he thought of as himself was gone.
It was as if there were two Morlocks. Drunk Morlock was careless, selfish, lazy, stupid, cruel—everything that Morlock hated about himself, everything he rejected. It was like the werewolves, with their day shape and night shape.
Not-drunk Morlock was still holding the reins. But drunk Morlock was slowly getting a grip on them.
This internal struggle numbed the shock he felt when he noticed Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono consummating their bond by having sex in the presence of the wedding party. In any case, it was no skin off his walrus: different lands had different customs.
Rather more worrisome to him was the way partners were beginning to pair off and nuzzle each other on couches. Apparently the ceremonial union of the couple was accompanied by more informal unions among the wedding party. Looking back on weddings he had attended over the centuries, he realized that things were not so different here—just more open.
When the pair mating on the dais assumed their night shapes, and a tide of moonlit transformations spread across the room, the coupling began in earnest, many pairs eschewing the couches and tumbling about on the floor. There were wolves, semiwolves, and a few unfortunates in their day shape, apparently unable to make the transition. Morlock thought this—and nearly laughed aloud. Werewolf notions seemed to be soaking into his skin. If he stayed among the werewolves much longer, at the next wedding he might actually join in. That was an amusing thought, and this time he did laugh.
He looked around for the wine jar: time to grab it and make his escape. He found it. He also found that Liudhleeo was still standing beside him in her day shape. Her eyes were half closed; she was smiling at him with shy eagerness.
“I'd've thought you'd've switched shadows by now,” he said, waving his wine bowl vaguely at the rest of the room.
She looked hurt, then sly. “Is that what you'd prefer? Some never-wolves like it—coupling with a partner in the night shape.”
“They're not as never-wolfy as I am. I've never coupled with someone who was not a never-wolf.” Morlock covertly tried to count up the number of negatives in that sentence, was unsure of his total, and added hastily, “I have only ever coupled with never-wolves. If you see what I mean. It's worked out pretty well for me so far,” he said wryly, thinking of his ex-wife. There was a little wine left in his bowl, so he emptied it.
“There are none like that here,” Liudhleeo replied. “If there were, she'd be a slave or meat. You aren't only because of who you are. I'm not the only female in the room who finds that fascinating. Or your scent fascinating.”
“I never argue about matters of taste—or, in this case, smell.”
She laughed too much and took his arm. He impatiently shook her off.
“Why are you being so cruel to me?” Liudhleeo asked, not as if she really minded.
“I don't know what's going on,” said Morlock, “but I can't believe you look on me with favor.”
Liudhleeo was amused. “Why not? You smell so wonderful, like blood and burning bone with a hint of poisonous leaves. And you're perfectly dangerous. Ghost, when you glare at me like that I just melt. And maybe you're not as beautiful as my sweet Hrutnefdhu, but nobody is, and anyway a female doesn't have to look at her partner during sex.…” She paused, horrified by a thought that struck her. “Unless. Unless they do it…face-to-face. Do you do it that way, Morlock?”
“Sometimes. It doesn't matter.”
“Doesn't matter? It bites me what males think matters. Not even monkeys do it that way, you know, face-to-face. It seems so depraved. Soft wet mouths and soft wet bellies pressing against each other. It seems so nasty. So nasty. Oh. Oh. Oh, ghost. You have to do that for me. I know you don't care about me. I know you don't care about anybody, but you can't leave me after putting that idea in my head.”
“Now I see why Hrutnefdhu didn't attend,” Morlock said. “Did you ask him to stay home?”
Now she stepped a pace back from him, her brows knitted in bafflement. “No,” she said. “Of course not. But how do you suppose he'd feel if he were here, right now, with pairs coupling all over the floor and the room stinking of sex—”
“—and his mate trying to couple with his old friend—”
“Is that it? You don't understand. You really don't understand. It's not a betrayal.”
“And I never will understand.”
She bowed her head, defeated. “Do you want me to find you another female, then? Or a male, perhaps? There are other never-wolves in town.”
Morlock stared at her. “My love life, grim and empty though it may be, has never been soiled by the presence of a pimp.”
She stood back another pace, tears leaking from her eyes. She gave him a last reproachful look and fled.
Morlock took his wine jar and a couple of still-sealed ones for backup. He made his way unsteadily out of the moonlit room, stepping carefully around (or, in one case, over) groups of werewolves in various stages of sexual congress.
The air outside was clean, by contrast, but warm as a summer's night. He drank a jar of wine as he walked slowly across the outlier settlement, dropping the empty into a stretch of swamp showing next to a walkway. When he reached the lair-tower, he found that he couldn't face Hrutnefdhu (drunk Morlock was a coward, among his other vices), so he decided to sleep that night in his cave. The last thing he remembered was sitting in the wickerwork boat, finishing another jar of wine.
The night was dark, though moonlit. The swamp water was darker and smelled bad. His mind was darker still and smelled worse.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE SHADOW MARKET
From then on, Morlock drank himself to sleep every night. Sometimes he slept in the lair-tower apartment with Hrutnefdhu and Liudhleeo, but he didn't like to. If it was him and Hrutnefdhu alone there, he was conscious of why Liudhleeo was absent. But when he woke up, and looked across the room to see them wrapped around each other, blissfully empty of thought as they slept, joined by something more powerful than sexual union, he felt strange, an intruder. Werewolves had no sense of privacy with those they considered old friends, but Morlock did. Besides, when he drank so much that he grew sick and felt the need to vomit (which was almost nightly now), the cave was more convenient.
He was not yet
drinking in the day, though. Morlock had been through this before, and he had a sense of fatalism about it. He knew that drunkenness would come to rule his life entirely and that he would be able to think of nothing else.
Perhaps that wasn't so bad, this time. He was, after all, dying. The ghost sickness had progressed so far that he could pick up nothing with his left fingers: material objects passed through the misty flesh as if it were air. If he was dying, if this was the end of all his days, did it matter if he died a drunk? He would be no more alive if he died sober.
But in the day he did not drink, not yet. He threw himself into projects and worked fiercely. He developed a wooden hand that he could wear over his ghostly hand like a glove. It was no good for fine work, of course, but it could bear weight, and the fingers could clamp shut for a grip, if need be.
For two-handed work, he had Hlupnafenglu. The red werewolf was strikingly improved after the removal of his spike—but he knew nothing about his past. His memory had been almost entirely scrubbed by the madness induced by the electrum spike in his brain. He could speak Sunspeech and Moonspeech, but he didn't even know his real name, so everyone continued to call him Hlupnafenglu.
He was intelligent and strong, though, with extremely deft hands. He fell into the role of Morlock's apprentice. The outliers could use many skills Morlock had, but he clearly would not be around forever to assist them, and he trusted Hlupnafenglu's character as well as his talent.
Together they forged glass weapons and armor for the outlier fighters. They began the challenging task of shoring up the outliers' defenses. Once Wuinlendhono found out what they were doing, she had a crowd of citizens put at their disposal and the work went faster: new watchtowers, armed with catapults and crossbows, soon bristled along the settlement's verge.
The days were hot; the work was hard. In the evenings, when his friends were sometimes smoking bowls of bloom, he would join them in a bowl of wine (which they always had ready, once they knew he would drink it). Sometimes they would play cards. Werewolves love to gamble, and they were all fond of the game he had invented called pookah or, as Hlupnafenglu always mispronounced it, poker. Later, while he could still walk, he would go back to his cave and drink himself unconscious.
He did not look well during the day, but his old friends attributed that to the ghost sickness that they knew was working on him.
One day he woke up, rolled away from the pile of vomit he had emitted in his sleep, fed the flames in the nexus with a chunk or two of coal, and staggered out to rinse his mouth and wash in the uphill stream outside his cave.
Rokhlenu was waiting for him there, sitting cross-legged beside the stream. The gray werewolf was, in contrast to his old cellmate, looking healthy these days. He wore clothes of green and gold, a gold ring with a green stone in it, and a green-and-gold band gathered his long gray queue.
“Gnyrrand Rokhlenu,” Morlock said. “You're looking well. Very gnyrrandly, in fact.”
“Thanks. Wuinlendhono is knitting some green-and-gold underwear for me, I believe.”
“She's treating you well, anyway. Mated life suits you, old friend.”
“It does. It does. You, however, look like a sack of moldy kidneys. And not in a good way.”
“I was wondering if that was a compliment.”
“It's not.”
“Well, I won't lie to you. I feel like a bag of moldy kidneys. Or maybe just the mold.”
“The ghost sickness is worse?”
“Yes.” Morlock might have added, And then there is the drinking, but he didn't want to talk about that.
“Look, I've been talking to Wuinlendhono about this. I want you to stop working on the defenses around the settlement.”
“There's more to do.”
“There always will be. You told me once you thought this illness would kill you, and it looks to me as if it is killing you. Liudhleeo and Hrutnefdhu both say that someone in the Shadow Market might be able to help. So I think maybe that's what you should be doing from now on.”
“Is that a gnyrrandly command?” Morlock asked wryly.
“It's a request from your old friend. You have been helping us so much. Maybe it's time to look out for yourself.”
“I can do that pretty well.”
“Ghost testicles.”
Morlock laughed a little. “Haven't heard that one. I think what I enjoy most about Sunspeech is the rich variety of invective and cursing.”
“It's good for that. Moonspeech for singing, Sunspeech for barking: that's the old saying.”
Morlock washed his face and mouth and thought. “Would I be allowed in the city? Anyone who smells me or sees my shadow will know I'm a never-wolf.”
“There are never-wolves and never-wolves, and then there's Khretvarrgliu. I don't think you'll have any trouble you can't fight your way out of. And the worst they can do is kill you.”
“I suppose,” said Morlock, looking forward to another night, and night after night, of drunken emptiness, “there are worse things.”
In the end, Morlock went with Hrutnefdhu and Hlupnafenglu through the northern gate, up the walkway to the Swamp Road leading to the Swamp Gate of Wuruyaaria.
The gate was wide; twenty werewolves in the day shape could walk through it side by side and still have room to swing their arms. There were a couple of lazy watchers on either side wearing dark armor emblazoned with an ideogram that, Morlock had learned, meant Wuruyaaria in Moonspeech. One of them sniffed the air curiously as Morlock and his friends passed by, but no one stopped them.
The borough just inside the wall was a thicket of tilting towers built on rather marshy ground. Nearly every citizen in sight was wearing the night shape, or some part of it: everyone was a wolf or a semiwolf.
“Dogtown,” said Hrutnefdhu. “Those who can't assume the day shape, or at least not completely, often end up here. People say they're more comfortable with their own kind.”
“What do you say?” asked Hlupnafenglu, catching an implied reservation. He might have no memories, but there was nothing wrong with his intelligence.
“I say they were kicked out of their dens by shamed parents who didn't want never-men stinking up their lives and reducing their bite.”
Morlock wondered, not for the first time, about Hrutnefdhu's family, and who had castrated him, and why. But he seemed to be speaking with some authority here: another outcast, for another reason.
They passed a werewolf nailing up a sign with hammer and nails. His paws had fingers as hairless and gray as a rat's tail. They passed another werewolf who was shuffling a dance on four human feet that grew from crooked canine legs. A chorus of largely lupine werewolves chanted and sang beside him. A small crowd had gathered to watch, and Morlock paused there too, fascinated by the show. But when he realized more eyes were directed toward him than the performers, he tossed a few pads of copper onto the coin-speckled ground between the dancer and the singers and walked off.
Hrutnefdhu and Hlupnafenglu were already standing some distance away, waiting for him.
“That was risky,” the pale werewolf said. “If you'd had a few less honor-teeth showing, you might have had to fight your way out of there.”
“Why?”
“Never-men don't like to be stared at by anyone wearing the day shape. In fact, it's a little risky for us just to be passing through Dogtown in the daytime.”
“Why are we, then?”
“Sardhluun werewolves come up the Low Road to Twinegate, and then into the city. There's less chance of meeting them if we take this way.”
“Too bad.” Morlock was sorry to miss a chance to fight some Sardhluun.
“Yurr. I hate them, too, Morlock, but this might not be the time to take on a band of them.”
Morlock opened his right hand and shrugged: it was a matter of opinion.
Hlupnafenglu laughed. Fighting, working, learning, walking—it was all the same to him. Morlock envied the sunniness of his temperament a little.
Presently they came
to an open area, and on their left was a gate, obviously Twinegate, not materially different from the Swamp Gate, except that more people were coming and going through it.
The area was dominated by a great stone tower, reaching from the swampy ground to the sky. Morlock kept on staring at it almost from the moment it came into view. There were narrow stairways of metal and wood running up the sides of the tower, and citizens running up and down the stairs. At the top of the tower was a great basket
“It's just the gate-station for the funicular,” Hrutnefdhu said. “But I forgot: you've never seen it before.”
“Not this close,” Morlock said.
Hlupnafenglu was almost as fascinated. “I seem to remember…Do the cars smell like onions?”
“I never noticed that. I suppose it might depend on who or what was riding with you.”
“How is it powered?” wondered the red werewolf.
“Slaves. They used to hire citizens to work the big wheels, but when the Sardhluun started flooding the market with slaves, it was cheaper to use them. A lot of citizens went hungry that year.”
The three ex-prisoners looked at each other, sharing a single bitter thought about the Sardhluun without the need to speak it.
Morlock said, “The big wheels. I can hear the gears working. I'd like to see them sometime.”
“We could ask, I suppose,” said Hrutnefdhu nervously.
“It's not important. Another time.”
They walked on, across the chaos around the tower's base, northward, into a new tangle of warrens. The land was drier and firmer; the buildings taller and narrower than Dogtown. The twisting streets were dense with werewolves in the day shape.
“Apetown,” Hrutnefdhu said in a low voice. “Fairly safe in the daylight, but you don't want to cross here in the night shape, in the day or night.”
Morlock nodded, and suddenly the pale werewolf's mottled skin flushed dark. “I forgot—”